Mozilla has submitted Firefox Home, its first iOS app, to the App Store. Although Apple shouldn’t have any objections to it, nothing is certain until the software appears on the App Store.

Firefox Home is a simple app that syncs your personal history, bookmarks, and open tabs from the Firefox browser on your desktop. Once you authorize it with your Firefox account, it’ll automatically sync the latest information from the cloud. The app sports a simple user interface with four buttons across the bottom: Search, Tabs, Bookmarks, and Settings.

The search field lets you quickly open long URLs by typing the first few letters. Bookmarks and Tabs buttons, as their names suggest, enable you to access stored bookmarks and the list of tabs left open on your desktop, respectively.

Of course, tapping any URL won’t yank you out of the app, but it doesn’t open the app in mobile Firefox either. Instead, the embedded WebKit browser takes over and renders the page. Check out the promo video below that highlights a typical scenario when this app could come in handy.

Christian’s Opinion

If you’re still holding your breath for the Firefox for iPhone browser, don’t – you ain’t gonna see it unless Apple changes its policy that strictly prohibits the use of non-Apple frameworks, such as Mozilla’s Gecko rendering platform that’s powering Firefox. Opera for iPhone, you say? Well, this app uses Opera Turbo technology that lets the iPhone app skip the page parsing and rendering.

Instead, the cloud renders your page and beams the resulting bitmap to your device. Put simply, Opera for iPhone is like an image viewer so it needs no special frameworks. The Firefox Home app is very cool, although I think it actually emphasizes the lack of Firefox on iPhone. Also, Firefox Home should sync my entire browser environment like Mozilla’s Firefox Sync extension, not just tabs and bookmarks.